Language, Culture and Maternity Care: ‘Troubling’ Interpretation in an Institutional Context

Abstract

This article analyses language interpretation in the context of maternity health care. By scrutinising how maternity health care staff reflects upon their experiences from the everyday institutional setting, the article shows that they are caught between a discourse on language interpretation as migrants' rights and a racialised discourse where language is intertwined with notions of `othemess'. As such, language interpretation becomes subsumed into a range of different practices that seek to discipline migrant women to meet the demands from Swedish society. In the article, therefore, the everyday practice by the health care staff is looked upon as a form of citizenship-making, and the article emphasises how racialised discourses take different shapes in different institutional contexts. Thus, the article shows that the practice of language interpretation cannot, in this context, be fully understood without including the larger socio-political context.